The Demon of the Air

by Simon Levack

“No, I don’t,” I snapped. “Look, I’m not talking about a pleasure girl—she’s a merchant’s widow and the mother of another.” I felt a sudden urge to pitch him over the backs of the seats in front of us and all the way down into the bottom of the court, just to wipe the knowing, lascivious smirk off his face. “Now have you seen her or not?”

  Indifferent to my anger, my neighbor turned back to the game. “Sorry, friend, but I can’t help you …”

  I did not hear whatever else he might have had to say.

  It had been just a blur of movement out of the corner of my eye, but the play had sent a ripple of appreciative murmuring through the crowd and one or two of the spectators were standing. The ball had come to rest on the short strip running across one end of the court and the team whose half it was in were standing around it. Judging by their gestures and the fragments of agitated speech that drifted up to where I sat, they were exchanging views among themselves about how it had got there and whose fault it was.

  “Oh yes!” The burly youth on my right was one of those on their feet. He turned to me. “You saw, didn’t you? That was a classic! The ball can’t have been more than a hand’s breadth off the ground when he returned it! That …”

  His voice tailed off as he saw me staring at him. Then the shock of recognition widened his eyes until they were as round as the ball.

  It was Nimble, Curling Mist’s son and messenger.

  He made an inarticulate noise and turned, trying to scramble out of his seat and clamber up over the tiers above us.

  “Hey!” cried someone in the row behind me. “Sit down! We can’t see!”

  “You can’t get out this way. What do you think you’re doing?”

  I reached up, grabbed the lock of hair hanging from the back of the youth’s head and yanked it firmly. He howled in pain and staggered backward.

  “You heard them,” I growled. “Sit down!”

  He slumped back in the seat next to me and glowered at me.

  I said nothing. I was so astonished to see him there that for a moment I could think of nothing to say. I could only stare and marvel at the gods and their sense of humor. It was hard to believe that even the capricious Smoking Mirror would be so perverse as to put this youth, of all people, in the seat next to mine.

  “Are you going to let go of my hair?” he asked, his accented voice suddenly sounding as young as his years. “It hurts.”

  I gave it a malicious tug, watched him wince, and let go. “Don’t get any ideas,” I warned him. “You and I are going to talk.”

  “Yes.” His tone was almost eager. “Did I hear you say you were looking for Lily?”

  If he had been sullen or truculent I might have listened to him, but his treating this as a conversation annoyed me. “I’m going to ask the questions!” I snapped. “You can start by telling me what you meant by kidnapping me the other day!”

  “We didn’t mean you any harm! We just wanted to talk to you!”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t mean any harm? What was the knife for, then? What about the body in the canal? You didn’t mean him any harm, either?”

  “Body?” Frowning, he managed to look puzzled. “What body?”

  “The one we found last night, floating outside the Chief Minister’s house—with a little message asking for me to be delivered to the sender. Which I nearly was, yoked like a slave at the market. And I was lucky—there’s an old man lying dead, back at my master’s house, because of your little gesture!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “I bet you don’t! Like you don’t know why the man in the water was covered in burns and cuts and bruises, the same as the poor wretch Shining Light forced to impersonate a Bathed Slave—or are you going to tell me you didn’t know about that either?”

  To my surprise he made no effort to bluster. He looked at a place between his feet and mumbled: “Look, that wasn’t my idea. I’d no idea he’d go so far. I thought we could get them to talk if we just showed them the cactus spines, waved the fire under their noses …”

  “Them?” I echoed. “You mean the sorcerers?” Then, remembering that, although the men around us were engrossed in the game, this was a public place, I lowered my voice. Whispering my questions made me feel uncomfortably like a conspirator. “The men who got out of the prison? Where are they?”

  He raised his head again, before turning it quickly as if he were looking over his shoulder. “I don’t think I can tell you.”

  “Well, if you don’t tell me, you can tell the Emperor! Have you ever been inside the prison? Do you want me to describe it to you?”

  “I can’t tell you!”

  “Where’s your father?”

  The boy stared at me. “My father?”

  “Yes, your father. Curling Mist!”

  “My father?” he said again, his whisper now barely audible. Then, for no obvious reason, he started giggling.

  He carried on giggling while I sat and gaped at him. He covered his mouth with his hand and giggled into it. I might have struck or shaken him but I was too shocked by his reaction to do either. He was still giggling when a sudden commotion broke out in the ball court, followed by a roar from the spectators around us.

  Distracted, I jumped up to find that everyone else had done the same.

  It took a few moments to find a position from where I could see past the people in the row in front, but then I saw that the players and the officiating priests were all standing about, their faces upturned and all looking equally bewildered. The ball lay in the dust in the middle of the court, inert and seemingly forgotten, as if it had served its purpose. It had gone through one of the stone rings set at the top of the wall.

  A strange silence descended over the crowd. It was as if their voices had drained away as fast as the blood from their faces.

  But when I turned toward him, the boy had gone. He had slithered away between the legs of the standing spectators like a water snake among rushes.

  Many years ago, the defeated side would have lost much more than the game. Their captain, at least, would have been bundled up the steps of the nearest pyramid, where the last thing he saw on Earth would have been the black face of the priest who took his heart out.

  I lived in more civilized times, when the losing team merely had to be hustled out of the ball court and got away as fast as possible to avoid being torn apart by a furious crowd of disappointed gamblers. Theoretically the winners had the right to pillage the losers’ clothing and possessions and the onlookers’ as well, but in practice that was the least of anybody’s worries.

  There was no point running after the boy. If I was lucky, I would find him later, trampled to death by the stampeding crowd, who otherwise would sweep him along with them. At moments like this the restraint we Aztecs habitually imposed on ourselves was abandoned, replaced by the ugly ferocity that so terrified our enemies. As the only spectator with no stake in the game, I kept my place until the last of the crowd had gone and the dust they had stirred up had begun to settle, only cringing slightly when two sandaled warriors trod on my legs in their haste to get after the losing team.

  I stood up and looked into the court. The winners were still there, looking, if anything, even more bemused than their opponents had.

  “Congratulations,” I called out.

  One of the players—the captain, I supposed—looked up at me imploringly.

  “Look, we’re really sorry. We didn’t mean it to happen.”

  I had gathered up my cloak and was about to leave, but now I paused. “What are you talking about?”

  “You must have lost a fortune. But it wasn’t us, not really. It was the gods—it was Tezcatlipoca.”

  The dust made me sneeze. “Don’t worry about it. I didn’t—”

  “And that other lot,” one of the other players added, ignoring me. “They shouldn’t have put so much topspin on the ball, in that last rally. How were we to know where it was going to end up?”

  “And t
he ball was harder than usual.”

  There was a note of genuine fear in their voices. Perhaps they were afraid of what would happen when the crowd gave up its pursuit of their opponents and came back for the men who had actually knocked the ball through the ring, but I guessed it was more than that. A god—almost certainly the Smoking Mirror—had touched their lives and probably changed them forever. I knew how they felt. He had intervened in mine enough times, seldom to the good, but I doubted that I had felt more desperate and afraid than they did.

  “It was a fluke. We’re professionals, you know. We were going for a points win.”

  “Come on, let’s get out of here.” The captain looked up at me again. “You can keep your clothes. You can even have your stake back, if you want.”

  “I didn’t have a bet,” I replied.

  “You didn’t?” He looked relieved. “Well, that’s all right, then.”

  The players began climbing the steps leading out of the court, talking quietly among themselves, perhaps about how they were going to get their newly won wealth home before any of its former owners tried to steal it back from them.

  I decided to ask them about Lily, on the off chance that one of them had seen her.

  The captain laughed. “Are you joking? We have enough to do keeping our eyes on the ball, never mind looking at girls!”

  A couple of his teammates laughed with him, but one of them—the youngest looking, a lad barely out of the House of Youth—paused on the steps and touched his lips thoughtfully with his fingers.

  “There was one, though.” He glanced nervously at his captain, who was glaring at him, and added hastily: “I only noticed her because she was the only woman—she stood out in the crowd. And not one of your pleasure girls, either. Middle-aged, I thought, and really plainly dressed, like a commoner’s wife or a merchant’s.”

  The breath caught in my throat. “Where is she? Which way did she go?”

  The youth lowered his head unhappily before his captain’s silent reproach. “I don’t know. Last time I looked, she’d gone.”

  I made myself breathe again. “Never mind,” I said. “At least I know she was here.”

  I turned to go.

  “You only just missed her, though,” the young man called after me. “She was sitting in the same place you were.”

  4

  So now I knew for sure that the woman had gone to the ball court in order to speak to Nimble. For some reason she had then left straightaway, vacating the seat next to his, which was how we had found ourselves sitting next to each other. The gods had had no hand in it after all.

  I went in search of the boy. I needed to find him, because it was clear from what he had said to me that he knew all about the Bathed Slave and the man whose body we had found in the canal. He could be the key to finding the sorcerers. It was easy to work out where he had gone: assuming he had been swept along with the crowd running away from the ball court, I merely had to follow a broad trail of footprints, broken feathers, tortilla crumbs and pipe ash. The trail ended a little way away, at the entrance to Tlatelolco market. A surprisingly small group of ball game spectators was milling around there, in front of one of the gateways in the long, low wall that stretched away on either side, surrounding the marketplace. A few were already on their way home, creeping away self-consciously while some of the more patient formed an orderly queue and shuffled in under the watchful eyes of the market policemen guarding the entrance. A vague air of collective foolishness hung over the rapidly dwindling crowd and made itself heard in the subdued voices muttering around me. It felt as if, having seen the ball game end so unexpectedly and run from the scene in such a panic, nobody was quite sure where to go next.

  As there was no sign outside the market of Curling Mist’s boy, I joined the queue at the gateway. If he was trying to hide from me, I thought, there was no better place to do it than the vast, overcrowded sprawl that was Tlatelolco market.

  The market was in its way as much the heart of our world as the sacred plaza in Tenochtitlan to the South. Between forty and sixty thousand people were drawn to this place every day. They came to buy or sell, or just to stare; to walk quietly up and down the seemingly endless lines of pitches and admire the goods on display and watch and listen to their fellow Aztecs. Much of our subject peoples’ produce ended up here, either through extortion or by trade with towns many days’ march away. Here, laid out on mats, guarded for the most part by middle-aged women, merchants’ wives, mothers and daughters, was everything you could ever want to buy.

  I wormed my way through the jostling crowd that filled the spaces between pitches, mumbling apologies when I ducked between a customer and the trader he was haggling with. I poked my head among the colonnades, peered rudely into the faces of passersby and craned my neck to stare over their heads, but there was no sign of Nimble. I searched for him until the Sun had sunk low in the sky and some of the traders were beginning to pack up their wares for the night, and I had to accept that I had lost him. For a while I wandered listlessly about, not taking much notice of where I was or what was happening around me, until I found myself in the jewelers’ quarter of the market.

  On either side of me were rows of reed mats spread with gold, silver, amber, jade, turquoises, emeralds and feathers. Some jewels were set into bracelets, others carved into ornamental lip-plugs and earplugs. Some of the gold had been made into pendants or arm bands, some into plates, some packed into goose quills in the form of gold dust, as a handy form of currency. Some of the feathers were sold loose, some made up into shimmering mosaics and some fashioned into headdresses, whose blue cotinga and roseate spoonbill plumes would float above the wearer’s crown while iridescent green quetzal feathers trailed gracefully behind him.

  I paused by the feathers. It occurred to me that if I wanted to talk to Lily, this was a good place to look for her. Exotic feathers were imported from the South, where I knew the woman’s family had interests.

  In any case the feathers themselves were worth admiring. The centerpiece of the display in front of me was a ceremonial shield, a leather disc pasted with blue and red feathers depicting the water monster we called Ahuitzotl, with its teeth, claws and scales picked out in gold. On the mat next to this was a great mass of scarlet feathers, sold in bunches, and they caught my attention because they reminded me of the bunch I had seen displayed in front of me at the ball game. These were fresher, however. They were among the best I had seen. Their color was as vivid as the Sun and the air stirred them as if they were still attached to a bird in flight.

  “Do you like them?” the stallholder asked. “My cousin supplies them. They’re our speciality.”

  No Aztec could resist such beauty—as glorious and fragile as life itself. “They’re lovely. What are they, red spoonbill?”

  “Scarlet macaw. These are the tail feathers.”

  “Where does your cousin get them from?”

  The stallholder was a young man, perhaps an apprentice merchant impatient to be allowed to accompany his elders on his first foreign venture. As he grinned ingenuously up at me he reminded me of Shining Light. “Family secret,” he said.

  “Oh, really? What family would that be, then?” I asked, a little too eagerly.

  The stallholder’s grin faded. “These belong to Kindly and his grandson—why do you want to know that?” His tone was suddenly suspicious.

  “I might have something for them,” I replied cryptically, “or for Lily. Have you seen her? She manages the business, I gather.”

  “Up to a point,” mumbled a new voice behind me.

  I spun around but I knew whom I would see before I had moved a muscle. I had heard that voice only briefly but I was never likely to forget it.

  Curling Mist was standing a few hands away, leering at me from beneath the layers of soot that caked his face more thickly than ever. One hand was concealed under his cloak. I could guess what it held. I could feel the skin on the back of my neck shrinking at the memory of that strange metal
knife.

  “What would you have that Lily might be interested in, then?” His voice was as indistinct as ever but there was no mistaking its edge of threat.

  I looked quickly around for Nimble and found him. He was walking toward us, a tuna cactus fruit in his hands, and gaping at me in frank astonishment. An instant later he broke into a run. “Stop!” he cried.

  Curling Mist turned sharply to face him. The knife slipped into view, its keen blade a streak of light as it caught the Sun. To my amazement he waved it at the youth. “Stay out of this!” he shouted. “If you don’t want …”

  I threw myself at him.

  I went for the knife arm but he was sideways on to me and it was on the far side of his body. As I reached across him to seize the weapon the elbow of his other arm shot upward and jabbed me under the chin. The blow was not hard—he was off balance, staggering backward under the force of my attack—but it put me off my stride and gave Nimble time to reach me before I could try again. Howling, the youth seized me by the shoulders and dragged me backward. I tried to tear myself free but he snagged my legs with his own and brought me crashing painfully to the Earth.

  I was on my knees then, with my enemies standing over me. In the moments I was waiting for the knife I was only dimly aware of what they were doing. I had a vague impression of jostling bodies and raised voices.

  “I’m going to kill him now!” The pretense of mumbling like a priest had vanished, as it had once before, on the boat. Now I thought his speech was familiar, but I could not place it. There was too much happening.

  “No! You mustn’t!” the boy protested. “We’ve got to know!”

  There was the sound of a blow, a sharp, youthful cry, and one of the shadows over me had gone.

  It sounded as if Nimble had lost the argument.

  Something massive and blunt bore down on the small of my back, pressing me into the dusty floor: Curling Mist’s knee, pinning me down.

  “Now,” he hissed, “I’ve been waiting for this!”

  Suddenly I heard Nimble’s voice again. It was choked and tearful and shrill but quite clear: “Look out! Here she comes—Lily!”